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Every one of the great playwrights push the limits of drama. Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their distinct way. The accomplishment of Tom Stoppard was to take ostensibly obscure subjects – ranging from chaotic systems to ethical thought and the enigma of awareness – and convert them into witty, imaginative and frequently touching plays. Theatre, the actor Olivier once said, is a great embellisher of thought. Stoppard confirmed that with his ability to animate intellectual concepts.

Initial Introduction

I was lucky enough to come across Stoppard at an early stage. That was entirely thanks to a man named Philip French, who, in addition to being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he requested that I to deliver a mini-speech on two radio plays by a back then obscure writer called Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an destitute writer accumulated an skyrocketing taxi-fare. And in Glad I'll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the voice of the time. I was impressed by the creativity of both plays and eventually met their emerging author.

It says much for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a critical opening night review of Real Inspector Hound – which I currently admire – he remained impeccably gracious. But one thing people overlook about Stoppard is that, as an ex-journalist himself, he knew the nature of the media.

Intellectual Gymnast and Emotional Substance

From the outset, Stoppard was celebrated as an intellectual gymnast: a man who was propelled by ideas as much as by character and storyline. But, just as we belatedly came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political dramatist, so we in time came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s intellectual concepts. The Death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern was acclaimed for its brilliance in constructing a drama out of two secondary characters from Hamlet, but repeated viewings reveal that it is about how we are all casualties of random circumstances leading to our demise. I remember the actor John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an definitive Stoppard actor, telling me, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is resisting the quiet, pushing back the gloom … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even heartbreaking.”

The characteristic combination of conceptual boldness and emotional substance was also apparent in Stoppard’s 1972 success, Jumpers. This, in the end, was a play that posed a significant ethical dilemma: whether societal ethics was a instilled reaction to history or whether moral sanctions obeyed an unchanging, heaven-sent law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the focus of a speech being written by the play’s main character, George Moore. But the more one saw the play, the more one realised that it was also about the suffering of a broken marriage and the perils of a disintegrating society in which space travelers were brawling on the moon and a ex- agriculture minister had been made Canterbury archbishop.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s achievement – one he shared with Michael Frayn – was to show that viewers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also thoroughly investigated. I remember, shortly before Jumpers, encountering him on the entrance of the a library in London where he was holding a stack of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more visible. The breakthrough likely came with The Real Thing (1982) which ages better than the majority of his plays to revival. It poses a whole host of issues such as whether any social obligation is the consequence of private derangement and whether ideas such as fairness and national pride exist beyond our perceptions of them. But beneath this – and what makes the play so relatable – is a acute consciousness of the ecstasy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which deals with determinism and choice, classical ideals and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, works because it is intensely moving. Concepts and sentiment perfectly come together in a segment where a exceptional young girl, Thomasina, mourns the disappearance of past cultures to which her teacher replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and lost to view will have their renaissance.” And that is precisely what happens, in that Thomasina’s groundbreaking rethinking of the classical physics survives her tragically truncated life.

Questioning the Power of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a playwright was seldom questioned. What was contested, especially in the beginning, were his reservations about the power of theatre: something he regularly explored in discussions. “I used to feel out on a limb,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a shit if you weren’t writing about the Vietnam War or housing. Now I have no qualms about that. To allude subtly to Travesties [his 1974 play], Importance of Being Earnest is significant but it avoids serious topics.”

I feel he was entirely wrong about that since Oscar Wilde's work offers a continuous critique on money, marriage, ethics, status, the decline of the nobility and the ascendancy of trade. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a number of works that engage to powerful results with the violation of individual freedoms by dictatorial regimes. One of the most astonishing was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first performed at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Soviet critic wrongly pronounced mad and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who imagines himself in control of an musical ensemble. It was astonishing both to see the full orchestra on stage and to see Stoppard unmasking the harsh illogicalities of communist repression with grim wit. As I wrote at the time, “force is met with wit and strictness with a